Exhibit AC

The third installment in a multi-part case study in PE/VC overreach: On leverage masquerading as innovation, runway delusion, and platform synergies that never land.

It was one of those nights when you turn off the lights and everything comes into view. As George carefully opened his eyes into the darkness, he found the darkness peering deeply into his soul with an intent primordial fury. Even for darkness, it seemed like a touch too much, but the darkness was getting worried. The highway to hell faced major engineering hurdles but Tony Platt had taken the company jet to Cabo.

In Ashburn, the darkness was also peering deeply with Sootgrove Capital’s servers through some direct cross-connect cables for optimal bandwidth. You may ask how darkness established a BGP session without an ASN and how it flows through fiber-optic cables—don’t worry about it. You could worry about how much Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street are making off of it.

George stifled a groan as he continued regaining consciousness. His narration was cohesive, albeit slightly too lively and playful. What it lacked in temporal and perspectival confusion, it more than made up for in a melodramatic and fairly eclectic but maddeningly ceaseless use of allusions, appeals to omniscience, and fourth-wall breaking. Every other facet of him had been hijacked, so why not his narration as well?

He had been living easy and loving free with a season ticket on a one-way ride. The demons had left after he had passed out. They were asking nothing and left him be. George was taking everything in his stride. The dungeon didn’t need reason and it didn’t need rhyme, but there was plenty George would rather do than go down and have party time with demons who were certainly not his friends.

I think, said a small voice inside of him as he wavered in and out of sentience, that I may potentially be somewhere in the desert. Is that a possibility? The image was conjured, streaming shards from some servers through a tangled mess of hops, all optimized beyond belief and beyond comprehension. After all—nothing succeeds like success—and sense and meaning are Fregeian constructs, anyway.

The Hôtel des Dunes of the Bene-Mora oasis near the Sahara has a certain rustic charm that has not yet re-entered the trend cycle enough for the big three asset-management firms to take a significant stake in it. There is also the matter of its fictionality, but that has rarely stopped the pioneers of financial innovation. They own all sorts of fictional things. These things are often quite profitable.

A shimmering melody rises from the blistering mid-afternoon sun, as an elder, in flowing desert robes and a wrapped headcloth cinched with a dark band, changes flowers.

You ask him what the song says. “It is the song of the freed slaves, madam,” he replies with a charm that even the suavest concierge in a Tyson’s Corner luxury hotel no longer holds. Oh, important to note here that you are Marlene Dietrich in this particular instantiation of George’s fractured narration. Just in case you didn’t realize. “No one, but God and I, knows what is in my heart.”

I’m not sure I know quite what is in my heart, says the small voice. ᴡᴇʟʟ, ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴍᴀᴋᴇꜱ ꜱᴇɴꜱᴇ, says a clear voice, ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇɴ’ᴛ ᴇxᴀᴄᴛʟʏ ꜰʀᴇᴇ ʀɪɢʜᴛ ɴᴏᴡ, ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜ? George stifled another groan as the shimmering heat of the air refracted his imagination out from the dark sterile room and onto the mirage of some 35mm heavily-saturated nitrate film.

“In the desert one forgets everything, even the heart one loves and the desire of one’s own soul,” Joseph Schildkraut tells you with that 20^th century Viennese charm that pretended to drive logical positivism through the heart of mysticism. And you are rapidly falling in love with the Russian Trappist monk who broke his vows and stole the secret recipe to the monastery’s ambrosial liqueur.

The desert is the garden of oblivion, a gentle man tells you. It was a pretty good year for fashion and a lousy year for rock and roll, Don Henley tells me, as I thumb through some overpriced pieces at Buck Mason. The people gave their blessing to the crimes of passion, with Luigi raising nearly a million dollars for his legal defense fund. It was a dark, dark night for the collective soul.

I looked for the lyrics. “Millions of songs. One month on us. Try it today,” the redundant purplish-pink gradient blared again as Messages’ indexing failed yet again and the kernel panicked, somehow with simultaneously more grace but less honesty than it would have years ago when crashes were rarer and thus less cushioned. “Here, lemme try to hide that for ya,” it seemed to be saying.

A little over a year ago, I was somewhere out on Broadway by the Four Seasons Hotel when a shape appeared in a cloud of smoke. I didn’t know him all that well. “Now that I have your attention,” he said, “I got something that I wanna say. I’ll change your life in ten seconds, so you better not fuckin’ scroll away.” It was so damned hot; I couldn’t stand it. My white linen suit was all soaking wet.

You won’t believe what Marlene Dietrich does next in this old clip from a 1930 film that made the patriarchy…come with me as I set up a passive-income stream using my easy three-step…you won’t believe what Ariana Grande is...Humphrey Bogart did this scene in…check out my unboxing and my review of my new Buggati e-scooter. Affiliate link below.

George struggled to retain himself as his mind spiraled into fractals of consciousness and thought. He saw glimpses of memories that he could not remember making, fragments of half-forgotten dreams melded with feverish imaginings and hopes and desires, and short snippets of carefully contrived content that stirred the most animalistic appetites in the unrelenting storm of distraction.

No matter how desperately he clung to a single thread of thought, the ceaseless shards of splintered reality crashed down on him, breaking any semblance of concentration he could muster. He could barely maintain a firm grip on the reality that, yes, he was hanging upside down in a dark sterile laboratory that had at one point had all the trappings of a dungeon with demons playing poker.

The sensation of the cold iron on his wrists and ankles was nearly completely obliviated by the entertaining thought—accompanied by the conjured music that obviated the need for him to actually remember anything—that he was back in black. Just then, the restraints sprang open, dumping George to floor that had just earlier manifested mossy and earthy rock.

He hit the sack of morphogenic microtubule beads, which briefly manifested as a pillowy substance to cushion his fall before defaulting to linoleum. Hellish.

“I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back,” said Andrew from the doorway—how did George know it was Andrew? Or was it maybe Ari? And did it matter? A short clip of Roger from American Dad danced in his head. It probably was Ari, right? Fitzgerald and Huxley pawned a biting phrase. George felt as though he had drunk the wine himself.

“You like it?” Ari, George was pretty sure it was Ari. Perhaps because Andrew had also walked in with a briefcase and looked very lawyerly. He looked like he had just gotten back from Hvar. George was fairly certain he had lost his mind at this point. What were these words swirling in his mind that provided him with exposition only to kaleidoscopically disappear into a cloud of oblivion?

“Yes, I’m let loose from the noose that’s kept me hanging around those agonizing phone calls with the investors. Because we have tapped into the motherlode.” He had demonic energy in his voice that still somehow sounded completely professional, reasonable, and almost reassuring. George was looking at the synesthetic sky because it was getting him high.

“Forget the hearse, we’ll never die!” Ari liked being slightly melodramatic every now and then. He was giddy that he had pulled the trigger on hiring those Ukrainian developers. In two months, they had done what the entire engineering team at Sootgrove Capital—as well as a plethora of dogshit subcontractors, bullshit artists, and horseshit purveyors—couldn’t have imagined accomplishing.

George felt the pain in his abdomen—or did he? He was delirious. Snapshots of thoughts were becoming increasingly pixilated in his metacognition. Andrew had turned on the light, but everything was getting darker in his peripheral vision. That seemed to be all he had left anymore: his peripheral vision. That and a narrowing central perception that continued constricting.

Did I make a mistake and do the drugs? His psyche felt nauseous. He had to vomit. ʏᴇᴀʜ, ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴏꜰ, said the clear voice. ɪᴛ’ꜱ ʜᴀʀᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴇxᴘʟᴀɪɴ. ɴᴏᴛ ᴇxᴀᴄᴛʟʏ ʏᴏᴜʀ ꜰᴀᴜʟᴛ, ʙᴜᴛ ɪᴛ ᴀʟꜱᴏ ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ɪꜱ.

“So, George, how do you like it? How do you like our Highway to Hell? Much better than the stupid fuckin’ road we were using earlier, right?”

George’s vision had narrowed until all he could see was a pinprick of light. He was gasping for breath. An ad for Toyota’s Christmas Toyotathon briefly blared in his mind. And then he died.